Throwing fuel on the fire of the Israel-Gaza conflict has been Trump’s worst act

A relative of 51-year-old Palestinian Nasser Ghorab mourns during his funeral in Gaza. He was killed during clashes along the border with Israel. (Photo credit should read MAHMUD HAMS/AFP/Getty Images)

Even the question, for the British Left, is fatuous, because the answers are so obvious. It’s the central foreign policy issue of our time, a blatant example of how post-colonial powers try, disastrously, to remake the world in its own image, and to solve its own difficulties by exporting them. It’s an injustice and a cruelty to an entire people, who have been foresaken not only by their enemies but also by their allies. It’s also a synecdoche, a small part of a whole – global conflict – that in itself contains all the elements of global conflict, in microcosm. And so on. In short, it ticks all the self-righteous boxes, mine included.

‘The end of Palestine also marks the beginning of Israel. The modern history of the two nations mirror each other, the triumph of one always the tragedy of the other’

But, goodness, this sympathy gets the Left into trouble. Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour has been riven for many months now by unquenchable accusations of anti-semitism. Hardly surprising, when such fools as Ken Livingstone find it acceptable to declare that “Hitler was a Zionist”, seemingly unaware of the grotesque inversion of the truth that his sophistry entails.

Dropping scorpions

Israel-Palestine is an issue that it is childishly easy to cause offence over, because every soul involved is its victim. The fates of the Israelis and the Palestinians are bound together, even though neither people wants this to be the case. Every controversial comment is akin to dropping scorpions between a brace of people tied together, back to back, expressly for this purpose.

This week, Gaza is in the news again, for the usual ghastly reasons. This latest outbreak of violence seems – like many have seemed – to be awful enough to mark change. But any change it marks will be for the worse, as is almost always the case.

Palestinian protesters were provoked by President Trump’s notion, expressed early in his reign and enacted with some speed, that the US embassy should be moved to the putative international zone of Jerusalem from the indisputably Israeli city of Tel Aviv. In return, protesters were attacked by the Israeli army, resulting in thousands of injuries and at least 60 deaths, one victim an eight-month-old baby.

Pakistani Shiite demonstrators stand on a US flag with printed an image of US President Donald Trump during a protest in Islamabad. (Photo by AAMIR QURESHI / AFP) (Photo credit should read AAMIR QURESHI/AFP/Getty Images)

Mirrored nations

Much has been made of the fact that the embassy in Jerusalem was opened on the anniversary of the Nabka, or catastrophe – the day that Palestinians were driven out of their homes and into the refugee camps in which many families remain. Of course, however, there are necessarily two anniversaries on May 14. The end of Palestine also marks the beginning of Israel. The modern history of the two nations mirror each other, the triumph of one always the tragedy of the other.

To have set this latest wave of unrest in such choppy, dangerous motion is, I think, the worst thing Trump has done. I’m appalled that such a number of people hastened to do his bidding, and organise this move. Other Republican presidents have vowed to move America’s embassy to Jerusalem. None have ever carried out their promise.

The whole, nasty, debacle fits very well the words of CS Lewis:

‘I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of ‘Admin’. The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid ‘dens of crime’ that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices.

‘Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern.’

Evil in absences

I never used to believe in “evil”. But now I have come to see that evil is simply an accretion of absences. Evil is the absence of certain stabilising qualities within human personalities – like having empathy, having the ability to take responsibility for your actions and decisions, the ability to feel remorse, to perceive a larger reality outside yourself, and so on.

The Israel/Palestine conflict is blighted by such absences on both sides, and Trump himself is the embodiment of such absences. He may as well have murdered those people himself and turned young Israelis into murderers himself. And he will not see that, even for a second. He will see what he unleashed and feel only pride in the reach of his power.

One thing I’m sure of is that Hitler was not a Zionist. I think all people with the smallest claim on moral sanity are sure of that. Another thing I’m sure of is that Hitler, with his unspeakable Holocaust, traumatised all Jews, and that Israel is a country born of trauma and existing in trauma.

I find myself wishing that Lewis’s words were true – that concentration camps and labour camps were indeed the “final result” of evil. People say, with some justification, that Gaza is little more than a concentration camps, full, like a prison, of people who were ripened for radicalisation long ago.

Concentration camps are never a final result. They are the start of a new cycle in which simple, human, fellow feeling is absent. Which makes Gaza a perfect area for the null mischief that a lord of misrule such as Trump knows no better than the revel in. He has dropped yet another scorpion between the backs of the Israelis and the Palestinians. He is an evil child.

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